Psilocybin Mushrooms: A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Learn the Effective Process of Growing Psilocybin Mushrooms Indoors and Outdoors

By Edward Lewis

Psilocybin mushrooms are also fondly called shrooms or magic shrooms, and there's a reason they're gaining a lot of popularity these days. They can serve several great uses for mental health and spiritual awakening. In this book, you will learn about the wonderful world of shrooms and how you can grow them yourself.

If you tak

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Lewis
• Release date: Aug 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088257395

Edward Lewis

Edward Lewis, propelled by the extraordinary success of Essence magazine, has become one of the most successful and respected magazine publishers in the country. In 1969, he cofounded Essence and later founded Latina magazine. Mr. Lewis was honored with the Henry Johnson Fisher Lifetime Achievement Award, the Time, Inc. Henry Luce Award, and was a 2014 inductee into the Advertising Hall of Fame by the American Advertising Federation. He is the former chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America and currently serves as Senior Advisor for Solera Capital, a New York–based private equity firm.

Book preview

Introduction

Psilocybin mushrooms are also fondly called shrooms or magic shrooms, and there's a reason they're gaining a lot of popularity these days. They can serve several great uses for mental health and spiritual awakening. In this book, you will learn about the wonderful world of shrooms and how you can grow them yourself.

If you take your time to go through all the available information on the internet about how to grow your shrooms, you will find there's so much information that it will leave you stuck in analysis paralysis. What's the best way to go about growing your shrooms? What are the pros and cons? Will a certain method work for growing them indoors as well as outdoors?

There's so much to wade through, which could easily leave those with no experience to decide it's better to buy than grow their own. While this is an understandable choice, you'll find that growing your shrooms doesn't have to leave you with a migraine, and it's definitely much easier on your bank account in the long run. So why not give it a go? You're reading one of the best books on the subject, so you can trust that you're in good hands. All you have to do is follow instructions, and in no time, you'll have mastered the art of growing your magic shrooms with ease like a pro.

Unlike other books on the market, this one is written in simple English, making it easy to understand. You won't have to worry about doing the wrong thing as you set about growing your own mushrooms because the instructions are pretty clear and straightforward. Whether you're brand new to shrooms or an experienced hand, you will find that there's a lot of value to be had from reading this book. So, if you're ready, let's get started.

Chapter One

Shroom Cultivation — A History

Psilocybin mushrooms are a polyphyletic group of organisms or fungi. They have psilocybin which, when metabolized by the body, becomes psilocin. These mushrooms are very popular across various cultures of the New World, specifically for religious and spiritual purposes. They can also be used recreationally, too.

People have used these mushrooms for their psychoactive properties for thousands of years. You can find depictions of mushrooms as pictographs close to Villar del Humo, a town in Spain. The pictograph shows many Psilocybe hispanica mushrooms with the same psychoactive properties as the cubensis variant.

Shrooms in the New World

Archeologists have made fascinating discoveries like the Guatemalan Mayan mushroom stones, suggesting that the Aztecs and Mayans saw the mushroom as a vital part of their spiritual and religious ceremonies and rituals. In fact, in the Aztec language known as Nahuatl, they called shrooms teonanacatl, which translated to English means the flesh of God.

In the sixteenth century, some explorers came from Spain to the New World, and records show that the natives were very familiar with the use of God's flesh, eating it when they had major events. One such time was when Moctezuma II became the Aztec emperor in 1502. This is information you can confirm from The History of the Indies of New Spain, written by Diego Duran, who was a Dominican friar.

Another friar of the order of Saint Francis, named Bernardino de Sahagun, also records in The Florentine Codex that he saw people using mushrooms. According to him, whenever merchants came back home after having success in their business exploits, they would eat mushrooms to celebrate and also so they could have important visions that would reveal the critical information they needed to continue their success.

Unfortunately, the Spaniards defeated the Aztecs, and as they did, they decreed all aspects of their tradition as illegal worship of false gods, which meant they also forbade the use of mushrooms. So, the Mesoamerican Indians had to keep their use of mushrooms hidden so that they wouldn't get in trouble with the Spanish authorities.

Shrooms in the Old World

While Europe did have a fair number of different species of mushrooms, there's not much by way of documentation that talks about whether or not it was used in the Old World, with the exception of the Siberians who had used the specie known as Amanita muscaria, and the information that is available isn't enough to pinpoint the species that may have been used. Thanks to Carolus Clusius, a botanist of Flemish origin, we know that the crazy mushroom (bolond gomba) was favored by the Hungarians in making love potions. Another mushroom known as the foolish mushroom was written about in Theatricum Botanicum by John Parkinson, a botanist from England. Then there are the most common species of mushrooms in Europe, known as the Psilocybe semilanceata. It's on record that it was used in 1799 by a British family who prepped some food with the shrooms, which they got from Green Park in London.

Shrooms in Modern Times

Physician Valentina P. Wasson and ethnomycologist R. Gordon looked into mushrooms, especially how they were used in 1957 by Huautla de Jimenez, a Mexican Mazatec village. Gordon offered a description of his first-hand experience with shrooms, published in Life magazine in an article titled Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Then there was Roger Helm, a mycologist from France, who had figured out which of some species made up the psilocybe family. He had worked on growing them in his home country and then analyzed them by Albert Hofmann of Novartis, which was called Sandoz. Hofmann is a notable individual because he was the creator of LSD. He and his team were responsible for figuring out the compounds with psychoactive properties in the Psilocybe Mexicana species. Later on, Sandoz would sell Indocybin, which was pure psilocybin.

Harvard University began looking into psilocybin early in the 60s, with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner spearheading research efforts. They conducted the Concord Prison Experiment from 1961 to 1963, observing how psychotherapy could be improved with psilocybin to help prisoners become better people and have a better chance of reintegrating with society. It was quite impressive. Unfortunately, Alpert and Leary were eventually terminated from their posts at Harvard.

Some believe that they were advocates of using psychoactive substances, which would disadvantage the scientific community's objective study of said substances. Under the guise of concern for the public, there was a lot of bad press surrounding psilocybin and other psychoactive medicine, so the laws grew more restrictive around them. BY 1966, Sandoz had to stop selling its brand of psilocybin because of the laws that the government had passed to keep people from producing, trading, or taking in psilocybin. Eventually, the US government made LSD and psilocybin part of the Schedule 1 class of illegal drugs in 1970, and this was a huge mistake and setback for the many benefits that shrooms have to offer. These restrictions made it hard to do research on shrooms, and those professionals who could do the research did so at the risk of being marginalized by their industries.

Regardless of the efforts of the US government, the fact remains that in the 70s, shrooms came to be the preferred choice for psychoactive substances, and this was thanks to works by people like Carlos Castaneda, who was able to share a lot of information on entheogens, as well as other authors who wrote about the art and science of growing your own shrooms. There was also the notable work of Terence McKenna, among others, who had written on the topic as well. They made the process of growing your own shrooms so easy you could do it with simple tools in your kitchen with no need for fancy chemicals or tech.

Now

There's not a lot of clear legislature surrounding mushrooms. Late in the 90s and into the early 2000s, some retailers would sell shrooms across the United Kingdom and the Netherlands using the internet. Many online resources help educate people not just on how to grow shrooms but how to identify them, use them safely, and what sorts of experiences and effects to expect.

Unfortunately, six-member countries of the European Union have even more legislation surrounding shrooms because the authorities have noticed more usage among the people. In the 90s, Europe studied the effects of shrooms on consciousness and how they could be of use in neuropsychology and neuropharmacology. Newer studies within the US are now bringing mushrooms back into the public eye.

The Law and Psilocybin

Senator Thomas Dodd sponsored a bill in 1965 that was meant to regulate hallucinogenic drugs. Still, the statuses created for all the drugs didn't specifically state which drugs would fall under the regulation. It was okay to have those drugs as long as people had them for personal use, not commercial use. It wasn't until 1968 when psilocybin, in particular, was banned because they claimed there was a high potential for abuse. It was also claimed that it had no specific uses in the field of medicine, despite the breakthroughs this entheogen is responsible for in the field of psychiatry and mental health. By 1970, they were known as Schedule I drugs.

In 1971, the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances was adopted and stated that members have to make sure that they prohibit the use, sale, and possession of psilocybin, restricting psilocybin to only scientific research and medical use with very strict controls. However, there's no specific reference to shrooms, thanks to the Mexican government applying some pressure. This means that there's much ambiguity about whether it's legal or not to have psilocybin mushrooms. In the US, mushrooms are mostly considered a catchall for these illicit substances and are therefore considered illegal. However, the thing is that the shrooms' spores themselves don't have psilocybin, so it's okay to have them in many places across the states. Some places like Germany have also adjusted their laws to make it illegal to have spores. Other places